HN user
With respect to what you're saying the K-shaped economy is, can you link a source? Since we're so keen on empirical and mathematical thinking (apparently). And if you thought I was being religious you misinterpreted me. I'm just allergic to dogma (religious or "rational").
How do you define "low" and "high" equilibrium? By estimated GDP or by actual production?
Because we definitely seem to be in a world where GDP inflation is getting more and more divorced from incentives to actually produce things.
With respect to AI and the paper being discussed specifically, all evidence I've seen is that AI's primary applications are within military and intelligence and that the escalating arms race in those domains is actively undermining things that people would generally like to see being produced (food and housing specifically are illustrative here).
"In a K-shaped recovery, different parts of the economy move in opposite directions at the same time following a recession or downturn. One segment—the upper arm of the K—experiences an increase in wealth due to rising asset values or incomes. The lower arm faces increasing financial strain due to declining purchasing power along with stagnating or decreasing wages." (source: Britannica)
So you have it exactly backwards: the K-shaped economy refers to the continued rise of asset valuations as workers real wages decrease.
But I'm not going to keep arguing with you since you seem to be afflicted by "Math brain" (defined here by the belief in homo-economicus where humans can be accurately modelled as a selfish calculator - and please don't correct me on the calculator metaphor, I'm being hyperbolic).
Let's take what we do know from AI and cognitive science seriously: if we accept that humans are some sort of biological prediction machine, that doesn't give us a completely predictive model. There's a sort of "measurement problem" when it comes to self-prediction: while the goal of environmental prediction is clearly accuracy, the goal of self-prediction cannot be accuracy since self-prediction is inherently accurate by virtue of the actualisation of self-predictions. What then discriminates within the self-predictive model between multiple actualizable self-predictions?
If Math-brained believers in homo-economicus are to be believed, then human behaviour is completely determined by what basically amounts to greed. Certainly that's what generally selects for those who occupy positions of power and prestige in our society, and thus based on current political norms has turned into a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy.
In this since Nietzsche was right: "God is dead." He was killed by enlightenment thinking and replaced with rational self-interested agents governed by predictable macro-economic models... which keep being wrong, because humans are not universally greedy and behaviour, politics, and psychology actually matter a great deal. (Nor is the new god of "rational" selfishly motivated acquisition, expansion, and power-seeking really that new of an invention - he is sometimes called "Moloch", and is in fact perhaps the oldest God, and humans keep discovering he's a pretty shitty God to worship; I have no doubt that he will prove equally destructive and unkind to us if we insist on continuing to and/or reverting to worshipping him dressed up in "rational" mathematical economic language).
Right. "Multiple equilibria". Like the two branches of the "K" in the K-shaped economy: capital owners gaining, workers losing.
So we're trying to prove "mathematically" that the K-shaped economy is "rational", and trying to circumvent the fact that the mathematical rules of economics depend on the social, political, and behavioural substrate by which those rules derive their efficacy.
Which is fine if nobody has agency, politics is irrelevant, and we just accept everything we're told at face value if it's framed in sufficiently mathematical language.
This reads like a propaganda piece aimed at mathematically inclined knowledge workers to try to stave off risk perception as their economic and political power is undermined by the US shift towards kakistocracy.
"workers operate with a larger conventional capital stock and wages rise even as the worker share falls."
Liberal Democratic capitalism splits power into two primary buckets: political and economic.
Marx provided the critique of consolidated economic power. The Soviet union proved the dangers of consolidated political power and Hayek made the mechanism explicit.
The "election tampering" BS is their attempt to try to undermine plutocratic political power. This looks like an attempt to justify the insane concentration of economic power that clearly goes against Hayek's description of free markets as a mechanism to discover preferences. Whose preferences?
If worker share is falling, workers are losing their share of the economic voting mechanism. Whether or not the emerging capital ownership class chooses to keep rents and subscriptions affordable to the new working subclass if and when they accomplish this power grab is immaterial, no matter how much math they try to wrap the propaganda in.
That's not how that's supposed to work!
Democratically elected governments should have no say as to how many billions of dollars of market activity tech oligarchs are entitled to capture and redirect towards their very noble goal of winning the competition to see who can build the biggest yacht.
And, of course, building bunkers for when enough of the general population eventually catches onto and gets tired of the grift...
Yup. I'm extremely unconvinced that a non-distributionary constraint (ex: limiting the money supply one way or another, i.e. the gold standard, bitcoin, etc.) fixes a distributionary problem.
You know what would fix a distributionary problem? A (re)distributionary solution.
The most obvious one is progressive/wealth taxation (a ceiling) and UBI (a floor).
Keep competitive market dynamics, narrow the window in which they're allowed to operate and add some hard constraints.
Here's my prediction: Trump eventually crumbles, but is replaced by an equally (but differently) inept establishment Democrat figure. Conversations about inequality and wealth taxation in the West continue to be (increasingly) suppressed. Backlash against both inequality and related anticapitalist speech suppression continues to grow. Capital interests continue to use redirection (culture wars, race wars, religious wars, etc.) as a diversionary tactic. China's collectivist unity allows them to continue to reorient as things continue to change and evolve at a rapid pace. America's silicon and software advantage quickly evaporates. Economic advantage follows soon after (already in progress due to USD debt crisis and associated inflation). Africa and Latin America continue to shift towards China or neutrality. South Asia follows a bit later. North America and Europe remain indecisive and overreliant on America, American tech, and USD financial markets. Taiwan becomes increasingly pro-China/pro-unification as South Asia reorients towards Chinese hegemony while Western hegemony continues to crumble in on itself due to its inability to reign in overcompetition (capture) which stifles innovation and deteriorating material conditions sew ever increasing conflict and fragmentation.
Tl;dr: The West competes itself into irrelevance while China cooperates its way to victory.
Whether or not the information war turns into a kinetic war depends largely on the West's ability to recognize that coercion, deception, and manipulation in the pursuit of dominance is not really an effective strategy in an information war.
And Trump was elected with the support and influence of the very cadre of oligarchs running much of silicon valley: Elon Musk, Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, etc., etc.
Elon Musk (not Trump) is actively still weaponizing algorithmic control of X to try to destabilize US "allies". Larry Ellison is doing the same thing with a whole swathe of media companies and TikTok.
The issue is the authoritarianism and patriarchal narcissism of an American-centered global elite who have gotten so used to "winning" they began to think it was God-given right and not something they'd achieved because their winning had (broadly speaking) been in everyone else's interest.
Now that their mindset has shifted to win at all (read: everyone one else's) cost(s) - do you REALLY think that everyone is going to blindly keep following? For how long?
The fact that America has yet to figure out the importance of soft power (and TRUST in particular) in the AI/information age is mind boggling to me.
The CLOUD act, FISA rulings, the Snowden leaks, and now the aggressive tech oligarch push to weaponize the unholy combination of AI, MAGA, and social media algorithms in an absurd and patently obvious attempt to impose (or maintain?) "world domination" seems likely to cement their downfall.
"Authoritarian" China's low-cost and open source approach looks downright democratic by comparison.
It seems increasingly clear to me that AI is forcing a reckoning in terms of how we interpret authority and control in light of new ways that information is evolving. The old political labels seem grossly insufficient to describe the present reality and the ones whining about "democracy", "freedom", and "liberal values" increasingly sound (and act) like bitter, out of touch old men desperately clinging onto a world that is rapidly outgrowing them.
Last time I checked, the closest approximation of liberal values are "liberty, equality, fraternity". They seem to think that "liberty" should only apply to them, "equality" is a threat to their consolidated power, and "fraternity" is something that should be weaponized to turn communities against one another to distract from the ways the oligarchs have been and continue to abuse and consolidate their power.
US government: "Bad Anthropic! Not patriotic enough. AI is only for American "citizens" (who we are actively trying to reduce/restrict to people we like)."
Anthropic: "Oh... American access only, you say? I'm sorry, we can't promise that (because VPNs and US-local cloud hosting and all that), so we need to turn it off completely."
...probably.
If so, I wonder what turn the political shenanigans will take next?
Based on the actions of the current administration and the short-sighted tech oligarchs who have been consistently pushing towards neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, probably one that further degrades trust all around and gives China even more of a leg up.
Let's see!
I think we need functional visual programming.
It seems to me like referential transparency and pure functional composition would be a much cleaner way to visually compose functions into larger functions (and eventually programs).
That sounds like an argument that someone with an unusual amount of wealth and power might make to downplay the unusual amount of responsibility that wealth and power confers on them.
In today's economy power and wealth are not even close to evenly distributed.
Claiming that responsibility should be evenly distributed is therefore a highly disingenuous argument.
Or maybe we should question whether structuring society such that the only way to be rewarded is by making rich people even richer was really the best plan?
Seems to me like we should reward people for achieving sustainability rather than only rewarding growth.
Maybe it's time to start substituting a bit of competition with a bit more collaboration and looking out for the needs of everyone? Just a thought.
That's not how that works. That's not how any of that works.
Needs are food, housing, and safety. Anything beyond that is not a need, it is a want. We're not giving everyone everything they need, and an increasingly tiny number of people are grabbing anything and everything they want.
We're about to start discovering that in a dynamical system with lots of other intelligent agents, our need for "safety" at a certain point does depend on others need for food and housing.
Let's try to remember that as we are laying them all off to give their jobs to AI.
The concept only makes sense for physical objects.
The problem are the definitions of "piracy", "robbery", "theft", etc.
There's two ways you could reasonably define them: by the loss, or by the gain.
From a simple ethical/logical viewpoint it stands to reason that if a gain can occur without a loss, that's good for everyone - so we should define theft to have occurred only when a loss is incurred (and hence intellectual property theft wouldn't be theft, and the very concept of IP makes no sense).
Unfortunately just because it's good for everyone doesn't mean it'll obviously work out that way. Defining theft by the unauthorised gain of something (regardless of whether there was a loss) lets those with the authority to grant rights to those gains profit. That profit can then be used to create incentives for others with authority (through lobbying, for instance), creating a situation where despite the fact that it's in the common interest to define theft solely on the basis of loss, it's in the interest of those with authority to define it as any gain which is not approved by an anointed member of the authority structure (either economically or politically).
Intellectual property is stupid, counter-productive, hurts culture, hurts innovation, and generally doesn't do an ounce of good to the vast majority of people on the planet Earth.
Blockchain refers specifically to a linked-list-like data structure which utilizes cryptographic hashes at each node to store an authentication of the tail of the list on each head (node). If you have a similar structure using trees, it's a merkle tree. Replication + message signing does not imply either (necessarily).
The idea that those who are falling through the cracks in the system is because they aren't working hard enough is crap. Thanks to the "golden age" you correctly say we live in, automation and globalisation have steadily eroded the value of human labor since the 70s (a big part of why real wage growth has been negative). Thanks in part to financialization and in part to anti-competitive regulations that benefit monopolistic incumbents, growth is increasingly driven by financialization and rent-seeking from capital owners. The fact that you are on HN likely means you benefit from your ability to assist the upper class (billionaires) increase their share of the wealth by diligently creating more and more intellectual property capital. The numbers don't lie, and the numbers show the poor are getting poorer (despite working just as hard), and the rich are getting richer (and none more so than the billionaires who own the intellectual property capital that let's them extract ever-increasing rents in exchange for granting ever-decreasing access to the latest innovations - particularly in pharmaceuticals and technology).
There's an enormous difference between a physical object, which has inherent scarcity; and information, which does not. We strongly enforce property rights on physical objects because since they are scarce, theft is possible (if a person acquires a physical object then someone else acquires it, it is necessary that the original acquirer no longer possesses it - therefore either it was a gift, or it was paid for in some manner, or the second acquisition was theft). The notion of theft of information was invented by politicians due to an utter lack of creativity with respect to how to incentivise the creation of a non-scarce resource. While physical property rights are rights in the positive sense (they grant owners of physical objects the right not to have those objects removed from them without due consideration), intellectual property rights are rights only in the negative sense (they grant the owners no inherent abilities they did not already have, instead they only restrict the freedom of others by limiting their rights to acquire something that would otherwise be limitlessly abundant).
Not true! We have no personal need for control over our information, as the utter lack of legal protections for personal privacy and personal information collection make abundantly clear. And works? Are you kidding me? Have you seen a typical corporate IP assignment agreement? This has nothing to do with persons (which the laws are making increasingly clear are irrelevant), and everything to do with corporations and their shareholders.
Inflation is just the beginning - I've been trying to ramp up on the relevant economics and I'm developing a picture of what's happening. Focusing on prices I think is a mistake, the issue is beliefs/trust/future expectations. Inflationary fears create a dearth of trust, driving people to demand "more" for "less" (i.e. >1.0 return on the dollar). This creates inflation, which exarcebates inequality, and ultimately prices most people out of the market. Once this occurs, demand implodes and the real pain is the ensuing deflation.
Basically what we're seeing is the inevitable collapse of 50 years of supply-side economics (or "Reagonomics" or "Trickle Down Economics", as it's often referred to as). The inevitable result of this is wealth stratification and ultimately demand implosion.
The next 10 years should be interesting.